I am a now True Wanker

I have joined the legions of True Wankers: I bought an Apple Macintosh. There were many reasons for that: I needed a notebook, I needed an Apple test machine, my current workhorse is starting to look old in the teeth, et cetera; but there was a reason against, and that is that I would become an Apple user. In my experience, Apple users are complete prats. According to the Apple religion, it is the most perfect machine on the planet.

Now how can that be? I know better: I owned an Amiga…

Anyway, if anybody has good suggestions for a programmer’s text editor? Am willing to run X. Oh, and holy wars over OSes are bad enough; no holy wars over text editors please! You may not advise Emacs or VI (the order, I assure you, is purely alphabetical).

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9 responses to “I am a now True Wanker”

I don’t have any recommendation for text editors (personally, I can work with Emacs if I must, but can’t stand VI and don’t understand what there’s to like about it) but I’d like to hear about your experiences, good or bad, with the Mac. I’ve been thinking of buying one myself when my ship comes in. I mean my third or fourth ship, or course.

O’Reilly suggested I look into the Mi text editor. It has line numbers, syntax colouring, and if it doesn’t destroy my documents and uses regexes for search and replace, it and I will probably get along just fine.

So far, my opinion is positive. Then again, I’ve worked with Macs on and off since 1990, so any peculiarities in the interface are likely to be lost on me.

I don’t like the way Mac OS organizes files; it would seem that Apple’s philosophy is that you should search the entire hard disk for programs and data, and search it a lot. I guess tools can be downloaded that will help you organize things.

The Ibook is shipped with a fairly complete array of applications, and as it happens I like these tools better than what you get with Apple’s professional notebook range, the Powerbooks. I can write my own summarization software, thank you very much. :-)

Anyway, apart from a few minor niggles that I am desperately trying to remember (that’s how minor they are), the Ibook experience has been pleasant so far.

File organisation is a big minus for me: I produce content in small increments and my directories get absolutely littered with master files, working files, pre-final files that need tweaks in another program, final files, text snippets etc etc. And I have to transfer them to up to 5 different servers by FTP. I have to know at all times where my stuff is, and need every bit of help I can get. I’ll remember this problem and would like to know about the available tools.
(Editors, on the other hand, are all the same to me as long as there’s a big empty space I can type in)

Well, last time I was looking for a text editor I got advised to use Subetha edit, and as far as I know the editor I preferred on classic, BBEdit is also available for OS X. I used that one to a great extent and still kept the nagging feeling it could do lots and lots more.

It’s easy to install CVS on your mac (there is a good howto on apple) and work on many different files in small increments as if they are in projects.

Apart from both mentioned commercial editors, you can also look at the download resources at apple.com – Mac OS X – Downloads, a lot of editors are mentioned there (Under productivity and Developement).

Textedit, is already installed. Simple, but powerful text editor. AppleWorks comes free with the consumer models too, does the job pretty well. Does this make me a prat. Btw, anyone who never really worked with a Mac for a long time, shouldn’t judge about it. I only met one time a user who wasn’t happy, because he was a die-hard gamer. But then you shouldn’t by a Windows PC neither, but a Playstation.

Hi Sven, thanks for the input. I do not know what makes you a prat. :-)

I thought Mac OS 6 was great, I feel it was at its pinnacle there. Not that it has regressed since then, but Windows XP for instance is often a better and more usable OS. Especially that last bit must hurt Apple, because its OS was built on a strong foundation of usability.

As for Textedit, it certainly looks like a capable text editor, but I need more than capable. I need professional grade capabilities.

As I reacquaint myself with Mac OS X, I will certainly be blogging both about positive and negative surprises, as I have done already.